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Are we ready to support online learners? This is the question that I posed in a previous post this month. The answer, as read in the post comments, seems to be that we are not yet ready. So who is? Well, it turns out that a company in New York City might be stepping in to fill the void while student affairs figures out how best to support online learners.

Instructure's Canvas learning management system (LMS) keeps popping up in the conversations I've been having. I'll be speaking to someone at a peer institution about this or that, and they will mention that they are either going with Instructure or considering going with Instructure. Or they will ask me what I think about this new Instructure Canvas LMS. The buzz seems to be positive.Common threads about Instructure Canvas that I'm hearing:

I’ve seen two films recently that reflect on the lives of women who work away from their children for jobs, opportunity and money. The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s successful Southern novel of the same name, and The Learning, a POV documentary about four Filipino women who leave their families for a year to teach in Baltimore’s public school system.

I recently re-read Charles Mackay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions. It contains perhaps the best-known account of the Dutch tulip mania of the early 17th century, but the section I found most interesting described the somewhat later "South-sea bubble" in England.

Periodically in the world of intercollegiate athletics, we cycle through a set of controversies, changes, and challenges that cause our many constituencies and the legions of interested fans and observers to generate remarkable noise levels. The commentary ranges from absurd to rational and from passionate to disdainful, and the rhetorical flights rise to stratospheric heights. For those of us who have lived through multiple iterations of this cycle, and others who have read the history of college sports, this all produces a sense of deja vu.

Is this desire to shed ownership of things a life cycle story, a digital story, or something else? Do you share my desire for life as a service? Has owning stuff also lost its appeal to you? 5 Things I No Longer Wish to Own:1. Software: Software as a service (SaaS) today may not always be possible or pragmatic, but SaaS is clearly the future. What enterprise or personal applications that we currently host on our servers or laptops will not eventually move to the cloud?

“I have a locker!”You forget what’s important when you’re ten.TW and I went to the parents’ open house at The Boy’s school. Now that he’s in fifth grade, he’s in a new building that unites the kids from the various elementary schools in the district. And yes, he gets a locker.

Lee Skallerup “Is it always like this?”This question came from one of the three male students in my 50+ person literature class, almost ten years ago. I was a new, young PhD student and I was teaching an introductory literature course. The class, in the four years that I had taught it, never reached double-digits for male students in the class. So, yes, I answered, it was always like this.

Brazilian education has expanded very rapidly in recent years, due mostly to private institutions, that now account for 75% of the total enrollment. Most of these institutions are for profit, and provide low cost, evening courses in the “soft” fields (management, law, accounting, education). In the last several years, the federal government has tried to increase access to public institutions, through affirmative action for students coming from public schools and black Brazilians, by creating new federal institutions and by expanding the existing ones.